The Kids Left Behind by the Boom

Henrry Ochochoque is a jovial 12-year-old with a report card full of A’s and hopes pointed straight to the moon. Last year, he moved from the squalid gold-mining town of La Rinconada, Peru — at nearly 17,000 feet above sea level, the highest human habitation in the world — to the bustling hive of Juliaca, roughly the size of Buffalo, where schools are better, a water spigot sits across the road and his widowed mother awaits a brighter future.

On a reporting trip last year, I’d heard his mother say she wanted to take the family down-mountain to safer ground. This year, I found them in a new home, not far from the shimmering waters of Lake Titicaca. For a child who once inhabited the ice and rock of an Andean promontory, with no clean water, no sanitation, in a mercury- and cyanide-laced mudhole riddled with whorehouses, raw sewage and AIDS, Henrry seemed to be on his way up.

But statistics tell us he is not. They say Henrry is too small for his age, and indeed he is: 4 foot 2, as tall as an average American 8-year-old. Statistics also say he is undernourished, anemic, with a brain slowed by toxic chemicals and an education that will leave him drastically unprepared for the 21st century.

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Credit
Clay Blackmore

Even as Peru, newly classified by the World Bank as an “upper-middle-income economy,” races to prosperity, indigenous children like Henrry are being left behind. Why? Because, as in neighboring countries like Bolivia and Colombia, the growing economy has left a wide gap between haves and have-nots.

Make no mistake: Peru is booming. Largely spared by the global financial crisis, its economy grew by 9.8 percent in 2008, 6.3 percent last year. Peru is an enviable fount of gold, silver, copper, fish, agriculture. Its capital is alive with foreign investment. Its cuisine is among the most celebrated in the world. Visit Lima, and you see a city abuzz with shops, restaurants and a robust new middle class. Visit Cuzco or Machu Picchu, and you cannot help but note the five-star destinations.

But look around more, and you see two Perus: effervescent Lima, 9 and a half million strong, and the 20 million more who live outside it. While the poverty rate in Lima fell to 15.7 percent in 2011 from 44.8 percent in 2004, the rural Andes and Amazon languish in nearly feudal conditions. According to the World Bank, a citizen of Lima earns 21 times more than a resident of the outback, where the rural poverty rate is a staggering 54 percent. To make matters worse, it is a starkly racial problem: the poor are the dark-skinned indigenous, the rich, getting richer, are mostly white.

This tale of two nations is all the more vexing if you happen to be Henrry’s age: 78 percent of Peru’s indigenous children live in poverty. A third of all rural children suffer chronic malnutrition. More than 70 percent in the Puno region have anemia before age 3. A 2012 study found more than 75 percent of adults tested for mercury poisoning in the Madre de Dios region registered triple the danger levels; their children presumably were exposed to the same danger.

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Henrry OchochoqueCredit
Gina Nemirofsky

The irony is that those who inhabit poor regions live on the very ground that is fueling the Peruvian bonanza. Mining is the country’s most lucrative industry, and mining firms from Canada, Australia and the United States have been rushing to dig out precious metals. Children like Henrry are hardly better off for it. They start work as early as 5. If they attend school, they do so for only a few years and in Spanish — not Quechua or Aymara, the languages spoken at home. Caught in a cycle of ignorance, marginalized by nothing so much as geography, they live out the old 19th-century cliché that Peru is a beggar sitting on a bench of gold.

This makes for a tale not only sad but also dangerous. Peru’s most rabid insurrections took seed precisely in the rural highlands. Túpac Amaru II, an indigenous leader after whom a two-decade socialist insurgency was later named, rose up outside Cuzco in the 1700s; Rumi Maqui in Puno in 1915; the Shining Path in Ayacucho in the 1980s. Last year, the Aymara people raided the city of Puno to protest the incursion of foreign mines and the pollution of their sacred Lake Titicaca. Last month there were no fewer than 71 riots in the mineral-rich provinces of Ancash, Apurímac and Puno.

“It’s the only way we can get attention,” says León Isaac Quispe, a sociologist working for the poor. “We are the rump-end of the country. We have no support from government. Corruption is endemic.”

He added: “No one helps. No one educates. No one listens to us here without a march.”

For Henrry, despite his A’s and sunny optimism, the Peruvian boom may as well be on the moon.

Marie Arana, a journalist, an adviser to the librarian of Congress and the author, most recently, of “Bolívar: American Liberator,” is a guest columnist.

Gail Collins is off today.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 21, 2013, on Page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: The Kids Left Behind By the Boom. Today's Paper|Subscribe